8/3/15

DIRECTORS DRINKING BOOZE

Sometimes it's nice to give a blog a month off. Unfortunately, the silence of the past month was an inadvertent one--I've been directing the Bernie Madoff mini-series for ABC, an event that normally I would have blogged to death. For reasons that are a bit murky and not really necessary to get into, I was more or less prevented from doing this. (I'll go into details in my forthcoming memoir, tentatively titled: "Raymond De Felitta; A Life At Home").

But we had a spectacularly great shoot and I'm now a free man, happy to continue this absurd exercise in 'brand-building' and incessant self-promotion. To that end, let's look at the above posted series of Suntory Whisky commercials, featuring Francis Coppola (young, fat and beard as opposed to old, fat and bearded) and--get this--Akira Kurosawa, who apparently could belt 'em back pretty good. This all came about because yesterday, on my first day off, I spent the afternoon watching the complete three-hour forty-seven minute version of "Seven Samurai", largely to make myself feel better about the huge amount of work I have to do to pull together the two-hour forty-five minute movie I've just shot. It didn't. But a healthy dose of Tito's (my version of Santory) did the trick...